Uh oh, a “why?” question in biology! There are many potential, and not mutually exclusive, answers to such questions. Ultimately there is a historical, evolutionary answer that underpins it all (“ostriches evolved two kneecaps because…”). But we like ostrich knees and their funky double-kneecaps (patellae; singular = patella) so we wanted to know why they get so funky. One level of addressing that question is more like a “how?” they have them. So we started there, with what on the surface is a simple analysis. And we published that paper this week, with all of the supporting data (CT, MRI, FEA).

Stomach-Churning Rating: 6/10 because there is a gooey image of a real dissection later in the post, not just tidy 3D graphics.

First author Kyle Chadwick was my research technician for 2 years on our sesamoid evolution grant, and we reported earlier on the detailed 3D anatomy of ostrich knees (this was all part of his MRes degree with me, done in parallel with his technician post). Here, in the new paper with Sandra Shefelbine and Andy Pitsillides, we took that 3D anatomy and subjected it to some biomechanical analysis in two main steps.

Ostrich (right) knee bones. The patellae are the two knobbly bits in the knee.

First, we used our previous biomechanical simulation data from an adult ostrich (from our paper by Rankin et al.) to estimate the in vivo forces that the knee muscles exert onto the patellar region during moderately large loading in running (not maximal speed running, but “jogging”). That was “just” (Kyle may laugh at the “just”– it wasn’t trivial) taking some vectors out of an existing simulation and adding them into a detailed 3D model. We’ve done similar things before with a horse foot’s bones (and plenty more to come!), but here we had essentially all of the soft tissues, too.

Ostrich knee with muscles as 3D objects.

Second, the 3D model that the muscular forces were applied to was a finite element model: i.e., the original 3D anatomical model broken up into a mesh, whose voxels each had specific properties, such as resistance to shape change under loading in different directions. The response of that model to the loads (a finite element analysis; FEA) gave us details on the stresses (force/area) and strains (deformations from original shape) in each voxel and overall in anatomical regions.

Finite element model setup for our study. If you do FEA, you care about these things. If not, it’s a pretty, sciencey picture.

The great thing about a computer/theoretical model is that you can ask “what if?” and that can help you understand “how?” or even “why?” questions that experiments alone cannot address. Ostriches aren’t born with fully formed bony kneecaps; indeed those patellae seem to mature fairly late in development, perhaps well after hatching. We need to know more about how the patellae form but they clearly end up inside the patellar (knee extensor) tendon that crosses the knee. So we modelled our adult ostrich without bony patellae; just with a homogeneous patellar tendon (using the real anatomy of that tendon with the bony bits replaced by tendon); and subjected it to the loading environment for “jogging”.

The right knee of an ostrich hatchling. The patellae have yet to form; indeed there is little bone around the knee region at all, yet.

We then inspected our FEA’s results in light of modern theory about how tissues respond to loading regimes. That “mechanobiology” theory, specifically “tissue differentiation”, postulates that tendon will tend to turn into fibrocartilage if it is subjected to high compression (squishing) and shear (pushing). Then, the fibrocartilage might eventually be reworked into bone as it drops the compression and shear levels. So, according to that theory (and all else being equal; also ignoring the complex intermediate states that would happen in reality), the real ostrich’s kneecaps should be located in the same positions where the FEA, under the moderately large loads we applied, predicts the homogeneous tendon to have high compression and shear. But did the real anatomy match the mechanical environment and tissue differentiation theory’s predictions?

Tissue differentiation diagram displaying the theoretical pathways for transformation of tissues. If tendon (red) experiences high shear (going up the y-axis) and high compression (going toward the left), it should turn into fibrocartilage (purple). Transformation into bone (diagonally to the bottom right) would reduce the shear and compression.

Well, sort of. The image below takes some unpacking but you should be able to pick out the red areas on the bottom row where the patellae actually are, and the yellow shaded regions around some of those patellar regions are where the compression and shear regimes are indeed high and overlapping the actual patellar regions. The upper two rows show the levels of compression (or tension; pulling) and shear, but the bottom row gets the point across. It’s not a bad match overall for the first (“real”; common to all living birds) patella, located on top of the upper knee (femur). It’s not a good match overall for the second (unique to ostriches) patella, located below the first one (and attached to the tibia bone).

FEA results! (click to embiggen)

Kyle says, “Being a part of this project was exciting because of the application of engineering concepts to interesting biological (including evolutionary) questions. Also, it never gets old seeing people’s reactions when I tell them I study ostrich knees.”

The study had a lot of nuances and assumptions. We only looked at one instant in slow running and only at one adult ostrich, not at the full development of ostrich anatomy and loading. That’s harder. We started simple. The tissue differentiation theory is used more for fracture healing than for sesamoid bone formation but there’s some reason to suspect that similar mechanisms are at play in both. And there’s much more; if you want the gory details see the paper.

So did we solve why, or how, ostriches have two kneecaps? We felt that the mechanical environment of our FEA was a good theoretical explanation of where the first patella forms. We originally expected the second patella, which evolved more recently and might be more mechanically sensitive as a result, to be a better match than the first one, but it was the opposite. C’est la science!

Enough models, let’s have some reality! I warned you this post would get messy, and here it is. Left leg (skinned) of an ostrich showing the muscles around the knee. The patellar region would be in the gloved hand of the lucky individual shown.

This study, for me, was a fun experience in moving toward more fusion of “evo-devo” and biomechanical analyses, a research goal of mine lately– but there’s still a ways to go with the “how?” and “why?” questions even about ostrich kneecaps.

We felt that the best conclusion supported by our analyses was that, rather than have homogeneous stresses and strains throughout their knee tissues (e.g. the patellar tendon), ostriches have a lot of regional diversity in how those tissues are loaded (in the condition we modelled, which is adequately representative of some athletic exertion). Look at the complex FEA coloured results above again, the top two rows: there are a lot of different shades of compression/tension and shear; not homogeneous strains. That diversity of regional loading sets those tissues up for potential transformation throughout growth and development. And thus ONE of the reasons why ostriches might have two kneecaps is that the heterogeneous loading of their knee tendon favours formation of heterogeneous tissue types.

Another, compatible, explanation is that these different tissues might have consequences for how the muscles, tendon and joint operate in movement behaviours. In due time there will be more about that. In the meantime, enjoy the paper if this post makes you want to know more about the amaaaaaazing knees of ostriches!

The early, hippo-like mammal Coryphodon. I didn’t know it had a patella but it does. From Yale Peabody Museum.

I’m not shy about my fondness for the patella (kneecap) of tetrapod vertebrates, and neither are the other members of RVC’s “Team Patella”. We’ve had a fun 3+ years studying these neglected bones, and today we’ve published a new study of them. Our attention has turned from our prior studies of bird and lepidosaur kneecaps to mammalian ones. Again, we’ve laid the groundwork for a lot of future work by focusing on (1) basic anatomy and (2) evolutionary history of these sesamoid bones, with a lot of synthesis of existing knowledge from the literature; including development and genetics. This particular paper is a sizeable monograph of the state of play in the perusal of patellae in placental and other synapsids. Here’s what we did and found, focusing mostly on bony (ossified) patellae because that allowed us to bring the fossil record better to bear on the problem.

The short version of the story is that mammals evolved bony kneecaps about five times, with marsupials gaining and losing them (maybe multiple times) whereas monotremes (platypus and echidna) and placentals (us and other mammals) didn’t do much once they gained them, and a couple of other fossil groups evolved patellae in apparent isolation.

Evolution of the patella in mammals: broad overview from our paper. Click to zoom in.

The marsupial case is the most fascinating one because they may have started with a fibrocartilaginous “patelloid” and then ossified that, then reduced it to a “patelloid” again and again or maybe even regained it. There needs to be a lot more study of this group to see if the standard tale that “just bandicoots and a few other oddballs have a bony patella” is true for the Metatheria (marsupials + extinct kin). And more study of the development of patellae in this group could help establish whether they truly do “regress” into fibrocartilage when they are “lost” in evolution, or if other, more flexible patterns exist, or even if some of the cases of apparent “loss” of a bony patella are actually instances of delayed ossification that only becomes evident in older adults. Our paper largely punts on these issues because of an absence of sufficient data, but we hope that it is inspiration for others to help carry the flag forward for this mystery.

The higgledy-piggledy evolution of a patella in Metatheria, including marsupials. Click to zoom in.

Some bats, too, do funky things with their kneecaps, analogous to the marsupial “patelloid” pattern, and that chiropteran pattern also is not well understood. Why do some bats such as Pteropus fruit bats “lose” their kneecaps whereas others don’t, and why do some bats and other species (e.g. various primates) seem to have an extra thing near their kneecaps often called a “suprapatella”? Kneecap geeks need to know.

Otherwise, once mammals evolved kneecaps they tended to keep them unless they lost their hindlimbs entirely (or nearly so). Witness the chunky patellae of early whales such as Pakicetus and join us in wondering why those chunks persisted. The evolutionary persistence of blocky bits of bone in the knees of various aquatic animals, especially foot-propelled diving birds, may help answer why, as the hindlimbs surely still played roles in swimming early in cetacean evolution. Ditto for sea cows (Sirenia) and other groups.

Early whale Ambulocetus, showing hefty kneecaps.

But I’m still left wondering why so many groups of land vertebrates (and aquatic ones, too) never turned parts of their knee extensor tendons into bone. We know a bit about the benefits of doing that, to add leverage to those joints that enables the knee muscles to act with dynamic gearing (becoming more forceful “low gear” or more speedy “high gear” in function). Non-avian (and most early avian/avialan) dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles, amphibians, early mammal relatives, and almost all other known extinct lineages except for those noted above got by just fine without kneecaps, it seems, even in cases where a naïve biomechanist would expect them to be very handy, such as in giant dinosaurs.

A quoll, Dasyurus, with what is probably a fibrocartilaginous “patelloid”. From Yale Peabody Museum.

However, tendons don’t turn to bone unless the right stresses and strains are placed upon them, so maybe kneecaps are a “spandrel” or “exaptation” of sorts, to abuse Gould’s ghost, whose adaptive importance is overemphasized. Maybe that adaptive myopia overshadows a deeper ontogenetic story, of how tissues respond to their history of mechanical loading environment. It has been speculated that maybe (non-marsupial) mammals have broadly “genetically assimilated” their kneecaps, fixing them into semi-permanence in their genetic-developmental programmes, whereas in contrast the few studies of birds indicate more responsiveness and thus less assimilation/fixation. That “evo-devo-mechanics” story is what now fascinates me most and we’ve poked at this question a bit now, with some updates to come- watch this space! Regardless, whether an animal has a bony vs. more squishy soft tissue patella must have consequences for how the knee joint and muscles are loaded, so this kind of question is important.

Giant marsupial Diprotodon (at NHM London); to my knowledge, not known to have had kneecaps- why?

In the meantime, enjoy our latest contribution if it interests you. This paper came about when first author Dr. Mark Samuels emailed me in 2012, saying he’d read some of my old papers on the avian musculoskeletal system and was curious about the evolution of patellae in various lineages. Unlike many doctors and vets I’ve run into, he was deeply fascinated by the evolutionary and fossil components of patellae and how those relate to development, genetics and disorders of patellae. We got talking, found that we were kindred kneecap-spirits, and a collaboration serendipitously spun off from that, soon adding in Sophie. It was a blast!

I have an impression that there is a large disparity between how the public views museums and how scientists who use museums view them. Presumably there are survey data on public attitudes, but surely the common impression is that museums mainly exist to exhibit cool stuff and educate/entertain the public. Yet, furthermore, I bet that many members of the public don’t really understand the nature of museum collections (how and why they are curated and studied) or what those collections even look like. As a researcher who tends to do heavily specimen-oriented and often museum-based research, I thought I’d take the opportunity to describe my experience at one museum collection recently. This visit was fairly representative of what it’s like, as a scientist, to visit a museum with the purpose of using its collection for research, rather than mingling with the public to oggle the exhibits — although I did a little of that at the end of the day…

About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure to spend a fast-paced day in the Ornithology collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA or LACM). I arranged the visit (you have to be a credible researcher to get access; luckily I seemed to be that!) via email, took an Uber car to the museum, and was quickly cut loose in the collection. I was hosted by the Collections Manager Kimball Garrett, who is an avid birder (adept at citizen science, too!) and a longtime LA native.

Amongst museum curators and collections managers (there can be a distinction between the two but here I’ll refer to them all as “curators”), there is a wide array of attitudes toward and practices with museum collections, regarding how the curators balance their varied duties of not only making the museum collection accessible to researchers (via behind-scenes studies) and the public (via exhibits and behind-scenes tours etc.), but also curation (maintaining a record of what they have in their collection, adding to it, and keeping the specimen in good condition), research, admin, teaching and other duties.

Most curators I’ve known, like Kimball, are passionate about all of these things, and very generous with their time to help scientists make the most of the collection during their visit, offering hospitality and cutting through the bureaucracy as much as possible to ensure that the science gets done. There are those few curators that aren’t great hosts because they’ve had a bad day or a bad attitude (e.g. obsession with paperwork and finding obstacles to accessing specimens for research; or just not responding to communication), but they are few and far between in my experience.

Regardless, the curator is the critical human being that keeps the wheels of specimen-based museum research rolling, and I am appreciative of how deeply dedicated and efficient most curators are. Indeed, I enjoy meeting and chatting with them because they tend not only to be fun people but also incredibly knowledgeable about their collection, museum, and area of expertise. Sadly, this trip was so time-constrained that I didn’t get much time at all for socializing. I had about five hours to get work done so I plunged on in!

Images, as always, can be clicked to emu-biggen them. Thanks to the NHMLA for access!

My initial look down the halls of the osteology storage. Rolling cabinets (on the right) are a typical sight.

Freezers ahoy! With Batman watching over them.

A jar of bats? Why not? Batman approves.

The curator cleared a space on a table for me to set bones on. Then the anatomizing and photographing began!

On entering a museum collection, one quickly gets a sense of its “personality” and the culture of the museum itself, which emerges from the curator, the collection’s history, and the museum’s priorities. There are fun human touches like the ones in the photos below, interspersed between the stinking carcasses awaiting skeletonization, the crumbling bone specimens on tables that need repair or new ID tags, or the rows upon rows of coffee cups ready to fuel the staff’s labours.

Yet another reason why Darwin kicks ass. And fine curator-humour!

Ironic bird pic posted on the wall.

Below a typical wall-hanging of a bovid skull, an atypical display of a clutch of marshmallow peeps. Contest to see whether the mammalian or pseudo-avian specimens last longest?

The NHMLA’s collection is a world-class one, which I why I chose it as the example for this post. When I entered the collection, I got that staggering sense of awe that I love feeling, to look down the halls of cabinets full of skeletonized specimens of birds and be overwhelmed by the vast scientific resource it represents, and the effort it has taken to create and maintain it. Imagine entering a library in which every book had the librarian’s hand in writing and printing it, and that those books’ contents were largely mysteries to humanity, only some of which you could investigate during your visit. Museum collections exist to fuel generations of scientific inquiry in this way. Their possibilities are endless. And that is why I love visiting them, because every trip is an adventure into the unknown– you do not know what you will find. Like these random encounters I had in the collection’s shelves:

My gut reaction was that this is a moa wishbone (furcula)- not often seen! It is definitely not a shoulder girdle (scapulocoracoid), which would be larger and more robust, and have a proper shoulder joint. It could, though, be a small odd rib, I suppose. EDIT: Think again, John! See 1st comment below, and follow-ups. I seem to be totally wrong and the ID of scapulocoracoid is right.

May the skull of the magpie goose (Anseranas semipalmata) haunt your nightmares.

Healed shank (tibiotarsus) bone of the same magpie goose as above. It had its own nightmares! No mystery why this guy died: vet staff at the zoo tried to fix a major bone fracture (bracing it with tubes and metal spars), and it had time to heal (see the frothy bone formation) but presumably succumbed to these injuries/infection.

Now that I’m in the collection shelves area, it brings me to this trip and my purpose for it! I wanted to look at some “basal birds” for our ongoing patella (kneecap) evolution project, to check which species (or individuals, such as juveniles/adults) have patellae. Every museum visit as a scientist is fundamentally about testing whether what you think you know about nature is correct or not. We’d published on how the patella evolved in birds, but mysteries remain about which species definitely had a patella or how it develops. Museum collections often have the depth and breath of individual variation and taxonomic coverage to be able to address such mysteries, and every museum collection has different strengths that can test those ideas in different, often surprising, ways. So I ventured off to see what the NHMLA would teach me.

Shelves full of boxes, begging to be opened- but unlike Pandora’s box, they release joyous science!

Boxes of kiwis, oh frabjous day! A nice sample size like this for a “rare” (to Northern hemispherites) bird is a pleasure to see.

Well, in my blitz through this museum collection I didn’t see a single damn patella!

As that kneecap bone is infamously seldom preserved in nice clean museum specimens, this did not surprise me. So I took serendipity by the horns to check some of my ideas about how the limb joints in birds in general develop and evolve. One thing I’ve been educating myself about with my freezer specimens and with museum visits (plus the scientific literature) is how the ends (epiphyses) of the limb bones form in different species of land vertebrates (tetrapods). There are complex patterns linked with evolution, biomechanics and development that still need to be understood.

Left side view of the pelvis of a very mature, HUGE Casuarius casuarius (cassowary). The space between the ilium (upper flat bone) and ischium (elongate bone on middle right side) has begun to be closed by a mineralization of the membrane that spanned those bones in life. A side effect of maturity, most likely. But cool- I’ve never seen this in a ratite bird before, that I can recall.

Hatchling ostrich thigh bones (femora), showing the pitted, un-ossified ends that in life would be occupied by thick cartilage.

A more adult ostrich’s femora, with more ossified ends and thinner cartilages.

Rhea pennata (Darwin’s rhea) femora; right (top) one with a major pathology on the knee end; overgrown bone (osteoarthritis?). Owie!

In birds, most of the bones don’t have anything that truly could be called an epiphysis– the bone ends are capped with thick cartilage that only gradually becomes bone as the birds get older, and even old-ish birds can still have a lot of cartilage (see photos above)– no “secondary centre” (true epiphysis) of bone mineralization ever forms inside that cartilage. However, there are two curious apparent exceptions to this absence of true epiphyses in avian limbs:

(1) in the knee joint, something like an epiphysis forms on the upper end of the tibia (shank bone) and fuses during growth (shown below). Sometimes that unfused epiphysis is confused with a patella, as our recent paper discussed; in any case, where that “epiphysis” came from in avian evolution is unclear. But also:

(2) in the ankle joint, several bones on both sides (shank and foot) of the joint fuse to the long-bones of the limbs, acting like epiphyses. It is well documented by the fossil record of non-avian and avian dinosaurs that these were the tarsals: at least five different bones (astragalus, calcaneum and distal tarsals) were individual bones for millions of years in various dinosaurs, then these all fused to form the “epiphyses” of the shank and foot, eventually completing this gradual fusion within the bird lineage. Modern birds obliterate the boundaries between these five or more bones as they grow.

These are worthwhile questions to pursue because they show us (1) how odd, little-explored features of the avian skeleton came to be; and (2) potentially more generally why limb bones develop the many ways they do in vertebrates, and how they might develop incorrectly — or heal if damaged.

Images below from the NHMLA collections show how this is the case. Fortunately(?) for me, they supported how I thought the “epiphyses” of avian limbs develop/evolved; there were no big surprises. But I still learned neat details about how this happens in individual species or lineages, especially for the knee joint.

Juvenile kiwi’s shank (tibiotarsus) bones viewed from the top (proximal) ends, showing the bubbly nubbins of bone (very bottom of each bone image; lighter region) that are the “cranial tibial epiphyses” often mistaken for patellae.

Adult kiwi’s tibiotarsi (sorry, blurry photo) in which all fusion is complete.

Looking down at the top/ankle end of the tarsometatarsal (sole) bones in a hatchling ostrich: the three bones are separate and hollow, where “cartilage cones” would have filled them in. The left and right bones have different amounts of ossification; not unusual in such a young bird.

Ossified tendons (little spurs of long, thin bone) on the soles of the feet (tarsometatarsal bones) of a brush-turkey (Alectura lathami)- seldom described in this unusual galliform bird or its close relatives, and thus nice to see. These would be parts of the toe-flexor tendons. Another nice thing about these two tarsometatarsus specimens is that their fusion is basically complete- each is one single bone unit, as in normal adult birds, rather than five or more.

My visit to the NHMLA bird bone collection was a lot of fun, because I got to do what I love: opening box after box of bone specimens, with bated breath wondering what would be inside. In this case, familiarity was inside, but my knowledge of avian bone development and evolution still improved. I got to look at a lot of ostriches, rheas, cassowaries and kiwis, more than I’d seen in one museum before, and that broadened my sample of young, juvenile and adult animals that I’d seen for these species. Their knees and ankles all grew in grossly similar ways, supporting this assumption in my prior work and building my confidence in published ideas. It’s always good to check such things. Each box opened takes some careful observation and cross-checking against all the facts and ideas swirling around in your head. You take notes, scale photos, measurements, do comparisons between specimens, and just explore; letting your curiosity run unleashed as you assemble knowledge, Tetris-like, in your mind.

And I had a lot of fun because a museum collection visit is like swimming in anatomy. You’re surrounded by more specimens than you could ever fully comprehend. Sometimes you run across an odd specimen whose anatomy tells you something about its life, like pathologies such as the terrible fractured magpie goose leg shown above. Or you see some curatorial touch that makes you chuckle at an apparent inside joke or mutter respect for their careful organization in tending their charges. That feeling of pulling open a museum drawer or box lid and peering inside is like few others in science — there might be disappointment inside (e.g. “Crap, that specimen sucks!”), boredom (“Oh. Another one of these!?”) or the joy of discovery (“Holy *@$£, I’ve never seen that before!”). My first scientific publication (in 1998) came from rummaging through the UCMP museum collections as a grad student and spotting an obscure pelvic bone that turned out to be highly diagnostic for the equally obscure clade of bird-like dinosaurs called alvarezsaurids. I happened to open that drawer with the alvarezsaurid specimen at the right time, shortly after the first ever specimen of that dinosaur had been described in the literature (~1994). Before then, no one could have identified what that bone was!

There is time for hours of quiet introspection during museum collection studies, immersed in this wealth of anatomical resources and isolated in a silent, climate-controlled tomb-like hall. It is relaxing and overwhelming at the same time. Especially in my case with just five hours to survey numerous species, you have to budget your time and think efficiently. It’s a unique challenge to explore a museum collection as a researcher. If you don’t learn something — especially in a good museum collection — you’re doing it wrong. In this time of tight finances and trends to close museums or stow away precious collections, it is important to vocally celebrate what a vast treasure museum collections are, and how the people that maintain them are vital stewards of those treasures.

I set the cat amongst the pigeons by also visiting the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in LA, to study fossil cats– like this American lion (Panthera atrox), code-named “Fluffy”, that we CT scanned during my LA visit– more about that later!

EDIT: I hurried this post off during my free time today, and still feel I didn’t fully capture the deep, complex feelings I have regarding museum collections and the delight I get from studying them. Other freezerinos, please add your thoughts in the Comments below!

Today is a special day for palaeognath publications, principally pertaining to the plethora of published PeerJ papers (well, three of them anyway) released today, featuring my team’s research! An early Crimbo comes this year in the form of three related studies of hind limb anatomy, development, evolution and biomechanics in those flightless feathered freaks of evolutionary whimsy, the ratites! And since the papers are all published online in PeerJ (gold open access), they are free for anyone with internet access to download and use with due credit. These papers include some stunning images of morphology and histology, evolutionary diagrams, and a special treat to be revealed below. Here I’ll summarize the papers we have written together (with thanks to Leverhulme Trust funding!):

My final year PhD student and “emu whisperer” Luis Lamas has published his first paper with co-supervisor Russ Main and I. Our paper beautifully illustrates the gross anatomy of the leg muscles of emus, and then uses exhaustive measurements (about 6524 of them, all done manually!) of muscle architecture (masses, lengths, etc.) to show how each of the 34 muscles and their tendons grew across a more than tenfold range of body mass (from 6 weeks to 18 months of age). We learned that these muscles get relatively, not just absolutely, larger as emus grow, and their force-generating ability increases almost as strongly, whereas their tendons tend to grow less quickly. As a result, baby emus have only about 22% of their body mass as leg muscles, vs. about 30% in adults. However, baby emus still are extremely athletic, more so than adults and perhaps even “overbuilt” in some ways.

This pattern of rapidly growing, enlarged leg muscles seems to be a general, ancestral pattern for living bird species, reflecting the precocial (more independent, less nest-bound), cursorial (long-legged, running-adapted) natural history and anatomy, considering other studies of ostriches, rheas, chickens and other species close to the root of the avian family tree. But because emus, like other ratites, invest more of their body mass into leg muscles, they can carry out this precocial growth strategy to a greater extreme than flying birds, trading flight prowess away for enhanced running ability. This paper adds another important dataset to the oft-neglected area of “ontogenetic scaling” of the musculoskeletal system, or how the locomotor apparatus adapts to size-/age-related functional/developmental demands as it grows. Luis did a huge amount of work for this paper, leading arduous dissections and analysis of a complex dataset.

Superficial layer of leg muscles in an emu, in right side view. Click any image here to emu-biggen. The ILPO and IC are like human rectus femoris (“quads”); ILFB like our biceps femoris (“hams”); FL, GM and GL much like our fibularis longus and gastrocnemius (calf) muscles, but much much bigger! Or, perhaps FL stands for fa la la la la?

Data for an extra set of emus studied by coauthor Russ Main in the USA, which grew their muscles similarly to our UK group. The exponents (y-axis) show how much more strongly the muscles grew than isometry (maintaining the same relative size), which is the dotted line at 1. The numbers above each data point are the # of individuals measured. Muscle names are partly above; the rest are in the paper. If you want to know them, we might have been separated at birth!

My second year PhD student Sophie Regnault (guest-blogger here before with her rhino feet post) has released her first PhD paper, on the evolution of kneecaps (patellae) in birds, with a focus on the strangeness of the region that should contain the patella in emus. This is a great new collaboration combining her expertise in all aspects of the research with coauthor Prof. Andy Pitsillides‘s on tissue histology and mine on evolution and morphology. This work stems from my own research fellowship on the evolution of the patella in birds, but Sophie has taken it in a bold new direction. First, we realized that emus don’t have a patella– they just keep that region of the knee extensor (~human quadriceps muscle) tendon as a fatty, fibrous tissue throughout growth, showing no signs of forming a bony patella like other birds do. This still blows my mind! Why they do this, we can only speculate meekly about so far. Then, we surveyed other ratites and related birds to see just how unusual the condition in emus was. We discovered, by mapping the form of the patella across an avian family tree, that this fatty tendon seems to be a thing that some ratites (emus, cassowaries and probably the extinct giant moas) do, whereas ostriches go the opposite direction and develop a giant double-boned kneecap in each knee (see below), whereas some other relatives like tinamous and kiwis develop a more “normal”, simple flake-like bit of bone, which is likely the state that the most recent common ancestor of all living birds had.

There’s a lot in this paper for anatomists, biomechanists, palaeontologists, ornithologists, evo-devo folks and more… plenty of food for thought. The paper hearkens back to my 2002 study of the evolution of leg tendons in tetrapods on the lineage that led to birds. In that study I sort of punted on the question of how a patella evolved in birds, because I didn’t quite understand that wonderful little sesamoid bone. And now, 12 years later, we do understand it, at least within the deepest branches of living birds. What happened further up the tree, in later branches, remains a big open subject. It’s clear there were some remarkable changes, such as enormous patellae in diving birds (which the Cretaceous Hesperornis did to an extreme) or losses in other birds (e.g., by some accounts, puffins… I am skeptical)– but curiously, patellae that are not lost in some other birds that you might expect (e.g., the very non-leggy hummingbirds).

Fatty knee extensor tendon of an emu, showing the absence of a patella. The fatty tissue is split into superficial (Sup) and deep regions, with a pad corresponding to the fat pad in other birds continuous with it and the knee joint meniscus (cushioning pad). The triceps femoris (knee extensor) muscle group inserts right into the fatty tendon, continuing on over it. A is a schematic; B is a dissection.

Sectioning of a Southern Cassowary’s knee extensor tendon, showing: A, Similar section as in the emu image above. revealing similar regions and fibrous tissue (arrow), with no patella, just fat; and B, With collagen fibre bundles (col), fat cells (a), and cartilage-like tissue (open arrows) labelled.

Evolution of patellar form in birds. White branches indicate no patella, blue is a small flake of bone for a patella, green is something bigger, yellow is a double-patella in ostriches, black is a gigantic spar of bone in extinct Hesperornis and relatives, and grey is uncertain. Note the uncertainty and convergent evolution of the patella in ratite birds (Struthio down to Apteryx), which is remarkable but fits well with their likely convergent evolution of flightlessness and running adaptations.

Finally, Kyle Chadwick came from the USA to do a technician post and also part-time Masters degree with me on our sesamoid grant, and proved himself so apt at research that he published a paper just ~3 months into that work! Vivian Allen (now a postdoc on our sesamoid bone grant) joined us in this work, along with Sophie Regnault. We conceived of this paper as fulfilling a need to explain how the major tissues of the knee joint in ostriches, which surround the double-patella noted above, all relate to each other and especially to the patellae. We CT and MRI scanned several ostrich knees and Kyle made a 3D model of a representative subject’s anatomy, which agrees well with the scattered reports of ostrich knee/patellar morphology in the literature but clarifies the complex relationships of all the key organs for the first time.

This ostrich knee model also takes Kyle on an important first step in his Masters research, which is analyzing how this morphology would interact with the potential loads on the patellae. Sesamoid bones like the patella are famously responsive to mechanical loads, so by studying this interaction in ostrich knees, along with other studies of various species with and without patellae, we hope to use to understand why some species evolved patellae (some birds, mammals and lizards; multiple times) and why some never did (most other species, including amphibians, turtles, crocodiles and dinosaurs). And, excitingly for those of you paying attention, this paper includes links to STL format 3D graphics so you can print your own ostrich knees, and a 3D pdf so you can interactively inspect the anatomy yourself!

Ostrich knee in side view: A, X-ray, and (B) labelled schematic.

3D model of an ostrich knee, showing: A, View looking down onto the top of the tibia (shank), with the major collateral ligaments (CL), and B, View looking straight at the front of the knee joint, with major organs of interest near the patella, sans muscles.

You can view all the peer review history of the papers if you want, and that prompts me to comment that, as usual at PeerJ (full disclosure: I’m an associate editor but that brings me £0 conflict of interest), the peer review quality was as rigorous at a typical specialist journal, and faster reviewing+editing+production than any other journal I’ve experienced. Publishing there truly is fun!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays — and good Ratite-tidings to all!

And stay tuned- the New Year will bring at least three more papers from us on this subject of ratite locomotion and musculoskeletal anatomy!

♬Should auld palaeognathans be forgot, And never brought for scans? Should publications be soon sought, For auld ratite fans!♪

Bovids to the right of me, pinnipeds above, what’s a guy to do but squee?

I’ve been doing some osteological studies of the patella (bone in the major tendon in front of the knee; termed a sesamoid) that have included frequent visits to the Natural History Museum’s avian skeleton collection at Tring. It’s a cute little town, northeast of London, in the green county of Hertfordshire where I live and work. The museum at NHM-Tring is a great old school multi-storey display packed with skeletons and stuffed animals in dark wood cabinets, with many critters hanging from wrought iron railings or other suspensions above (see above). I blogged about the Unfeathered Bird exhibit (and book) that just finished up its tour there yesterday. And I’ll be blogging later, as I keep promising, about the cool things I’ve learned during the past year of my studies of the form, function, development and evolution of the patella.

As an aside, I heartily recommend doing research at the NHM-Tring. It’s away from the bustle (and arduous Tube trip) of the South Kensington NHM, and the curatorial staff are immensely helpful… and there is something else that makes the trip even more enjoyable, but you must read more below to find out about it.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 2/10; 150-year-old dry bones. But an advance warning to (1) diabetics and (2) pun-haters, for reasons that will become evident.

Today I have a short pictorial exhibit of something wonderful I ran into while patellavating in the NHM collections. As often happens while doing museum research, I had a serendipitous encounter with a bit of history that blew my mind a little, and had me geeking out. These things happen because museum collections are stuffed with specimens that, to the right eyes or the right mindset, pack a profound historical whallop. As a scientist who is pretty keen on chickens (Gallus gallus), there are probablyno museum specimens of chickens that would get me more excited about than the chickens Darwin studied in his investigations of artificial selection. In fact, most museum specimens of domestic chickens would not be that interesting to me, especially after seeing these ones.

Darwin wielded the analogy between artificial selection and his conceptual mechanism of natural selection in the first ~4 chapters of On the Origin of Species to clobber the reader with facts and try to leave them with no doubt that, over millennia, nature could craft organisms in vastly more complex and profoundways than human breeders could mould them over centuries. While people most often speak of Darwin’s pigeons when referring to Darwin and avians or artificial selection and variation, his chickens appear in The Origin and other writings quite often, too (most prominently, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domesticationin 1868– more about that here). For example, from my 1st edition facsimile of The Origin from Harvard University Press, pp. 215-216:

“Natural instincts are lost under domestication… It is not that chickens have lost all fear, but fear only of dogs and cats, for if the hen gives the danger-chuckle, they will run… and conceal themselves in the surrounding grass or thickets; and this is evidently done for the instinctive purpose of allowing, as we see in wild ground-birds, their mother to fly away. But this instinct retained by our chickens has become almost useless under domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the power of flight.”

Well told, Mr D!

I am also reminded of how chickens and Darwin have had darker relationships, such as this sad story. Or how evolution via Darwinian mechanisms crosses paths with pop culture in fowl ways, such as how tastes-like-chicken evolved, or how some say that chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now heritably predisposed to cross roads, or that the amniote egg preceded the evolution of the genus Gallus by some 325+ million years. I see I am drifting and drifting further away from the topic at hand, so let me segue back to Darwin’s chickens. We’ll take this corridor there:

Inside the avian osteology collection at Tring. Sterile at it might outwardly seem, places like this are fertile breeding grounds for scientific discovery. And a sterile-looking collection means well cared-for specimens that will persevere for future discoveries.

So anyway, when museum curator Jo Cooper said to me something like “I have some of Darwin’s chickens out over on the other counter, do you want to have a look or shall I put them away?” my answer was quick and emphatic. YES! But only after lunch. I was hungry, and nothing stops me from sating that hunger especially when the sun is out and there are some fine pubs within walking distance! I settled on the King’s Arms freehouse, and had a delicious cheeseburger followed by a spectacularly good apple-treacle-cake with ice cream, expediently ingested while out on their sunny patio. Yum! I cannot wait to have that cake again. What a cake! Darwin’s bushy eyebrows would have been mightily elevated by the highly evolved flavour, which would have soothed his savage stomach ailments. He would have been like:

“Damn, Emma! Holy s___ this is great apple-cake; here, try some! There is grandeur in this tasty cake, with its several flavours, having been originally cooked into a few baking trays or into one; and that, whilst this pub has gone on serving fine food according to the fixed hygiene laws of Tring, from so simple a beginning endless foods most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, devoured.” And Emma, cake then firmly in hand, would have said something like, “My dear Charles, I shall try this enticing dessert, and I am glad to see you so enthused about something other than barnacles. Write a letter to Huxley or Lyell about that cake later. You need to focus on concocting an ending to that big species book of yours, not cakes. It’s been 20 bloody years, dude; cake can wait. End the book on a high note.” And so it must have happened.

Working at a museum collection is like having an extra home/office for a day or more. You get familiar with the environment while working there, and start to settle in and enjoy the local environs while taking work breaks. Or I do, anyway. So this post is also partly about how cake and other provisions are an important part, or even a perk, of life as a visiting museum researcher. Put in some good solid work, then it’s cake time, but where are the cakes? You explore, and you discover them– opening the door of an unfamiliar shop or pub near a museum can be like opening a museum cabinet to discover the goodness inside. Just don’t get them mixed up.Museum specimens: for research; subjects for science. Cakes: for eating; fuel for scientists. Got it?

But I digest digress. This post is not about my lunch. Not so much, anyway, although I did enjoy the cake quite a bit. Back to the chickens. Here, try some!

Above: Views of Darwin’s chickens laid out at the NHM-Tring. (all photos in this post can be clucked to emchicken them)

The chickens, much like the pub lunch, did not disappoint in the least. Here I had before me Darwin’s own personal specimens, which I envisioned him dissecting and defleshing himself, studying them in deep introspection, then handing them over to the museum for curation once his lengthy researches were complete (all the ones I studied dated back to around 1863-1868, so they were curated shortly after The Origin was published (1859)). Perhaps the museum gave him some fine sponge-cake in return. There was at least one male and female adult of each of numerous breeds, many of them still bearing the dried flesh of centuries past. This was great for me, as the patella often gets removed and clucked chucked in the bin with its tendon when museum specimens of birds are prepared (much as elephant “sixth toe” sesamoids are). All of the specimens had their honking huge patellae on display, so that’s what a lot of my photos feature. I do so lament that I did not take a photo of the cake. Did I tell you about that cake? Oh… Check out these examples of Darwin’s chickens:

African rooster (wild variety? Darwin’s label was not clear) in right side view, with the patella indicated by a red arrow. That patella is still attached to the tibiotarsus by the patellar tendon (often misnamed the patellar “ligament”, but it is just a continuation of the proximal tendon).

Darwin’s handwritten label and the well-endowed patella of the Spanish Cock. What? Oh, you. Stop it. That has nothing to do with cake, and only cake-related humour is allowed in this post.

Some other fascinating features exhibited by Darwin’s chickens, which he doubtless mulled over while nibbling on fine cakes, included the following:

The hindlimb of a Polish Silver Laced breed, nicely showing the ossified tendons (red arrow) along the tarsometatarsus. Why these tendons turn into bone is one of the great unsolved mysteries of bone biology/mechanics and avian evolution.

Check out the famed feather crest of the Silver (Laced) Polish here; it gets so extreme in males that they have a hard time seeing, and can get beaten up by other cockerels when kept in mixed breed flocks.

Here on this blog, and of course on the companion blog “Towards the Chicken of the Future,” domestic chickens and wild junglefowl have often come up, most recently with the Dorking Chicken (another of Darwin’s own specimens that I studied) in the “Mystery Museum Specimen” poetry round of late. Dorkings are HUGE chickens; easily twice the weight of even a broiler chicken, up to 4-5kg. The Dorking-characteristic polydactyly featured in that post is also observed at a relatively high incidence in Silkie and Sultan breeds, I’ve learned. Like this one! (I was so patella-focused, or cake-somnolescent, that I missed it while studying at the museum and only noticed it now while browsing through my photos, bereft of cake)

Nice leg of a Sultan hen. There is an extra toe here as in the Dorking chicken; a duplicate hallux (first toe). This is not, as it might at first seem, a pathological condition as in modern “twisted toe”-suffering domestic chickens.

Malays are another giant breed like the Dorking, but with longer and more muscular legs and longer necks, looking much more like a classic, badass wild junglefowl than a fancy, pampered chicken. But here, undressed to the bare bones, it just looks like a skinny chicken leg, albeit perhaps a bit svelte compared to the Dorking or Sultan.

Hindlimb of a Malay breed of chicken, which Wikipedia nicely tells the story of its misnomer (it may originate from Pakistan, not Malaysia!). Can you find the nice patella? Check out Darwin’s lovely label, too.

You may have come across wild-eyed news stories 5 years ago about “OMG Darwin was sooooooo wrong about chickens!”, referring to his writings on the origin of domestic chickens from Red junglefowl. As Greg Laden adeptly wrote, Darwin (say it with me) didn’t really get it very wrong after all. He did quite well, in fact. Some media outlets did get it more wrong, probably inspired by this press release. Oh well; the science they were reporting about definitely was interesting- modern chickens seem to have some of their yellow skin pigmentation-related genes from Grey junglefowl, although they are still largely descendants of Red junglefowl.

Here, have a JUMBLE-fowl, or rather a junglefowl cockerel, with another Darwin label:

Darwin’s example of a wild-type chicken; a Red junglefowl. As he suspected, these Asian birds were the ancestors of domestic chickens, but today evidence indicates that domestication may have occurred multiple times in Asia and with different wild varieties of junglefowl bred/mixed in different regions.

Some breeds aren’t so funky inside, of course, but just have cool feather patterns on the outside, like the “pencilling” (dark streaks on white feathers) evident in pencil breeds; also called triple-laced. Like this fine chap below once would have had, before Darwin tore off his feathers and reduced him to a research-friendly naked skeleton:

A Golden Pencil(led) Hamburg breed of chicken (cockerel), whose skeleton features the leg and a fine articulated patella.

Also known as the Holland Fowl, several European countries including the UK claim the Hamsburg as an original breed from their respective realm, and no surprise they do- it’s a lovely spangled chicken. Then, later in the 1800’s the Americans got involved in breeding them, too, and it’s all a big mess. They should get together, have some delectable cakes, and just sort it out.

Scaly, still-greasy foot and hindlimb of what Darwin labelled as the male of a “Game” breed.

We thus close with another leg of another chicken. Darwin was a bit naughty here, or else terminology of breeds has changed a lot since the 1850’s (very possible), as he just labelled this as a “Game” cockerel. Now, Gamefowl is a big category of breeds. I’m guessing this one was either (1) a Cornish/Indian Game variety or (2) an Old or Modern English Game Fowl. Maybe a person who knows their chicken breeding far better than me (that’s not hard!) will opine differently. The latter varieties were popular in Darwin’s time — the (Muffed) Old English version was mated with other breeds (Malay?) to produce the Modern English form as cockfighting “sports” became banned in 1849 and breeder attentions shifted to the polar opposite of producing showy, fancy birds instead. And thus the bufante, feathered-hair-adorned 1980s pop-rock group was created, to sing about mating or moulting or melting with people or something terribly disgusting and probably having nothing at all to do with chickens, cake, or cockfighting, or other more seemly pursuits.

So, we have come to the end of my photos of Darwin’s chicken leg bones and such. If you’ve learned something here about chicken breeds, patellae, cake, or Darwin, that’s simply frabjous. Enough of those poncey pigeons, already! I’m crying fo… no, I won’t use that pun. Nevermind. Not even remotely cake-related. Let’s give Darwin’s chickens their just desserts, is the point– and a much better pun, too. Darwin’s chickens are an important part of Darwiniana, and an interesting evolutionary study in and of themselves. I’ve certainly become impressed during my researching for this blog post by the diverse, fascinating biology of chicken breeds. My copy of the “Complete Encyclopedia of Chickens” will be getting some more thorough reading shortly.

Today, however, I am off to return to the NHM-Tring and peruse their other, non-chickeny Galliformes and Anseriformes, with a detour to the mythical hoatzin. But… but… there may be a cake detour involved, too. I shall report back in due course. Off I go!

A short(ish) post, but to me an important one. As I’ve mentioned here before, and still mean to write a detailed post on, I’m on a 1-year Royal Society Leverhulme Trust senior research fellowship (pause to breathe… long phrase there!) to study the mechanics and evolution of the kneecap (patella) in birds. Knees are very cool, and the patella is one of the coolest parts of the knee. My fellowship is aimed at returning to my roots, i.e. my PhD research on theropod dinosaur hindlimb evolution (anatomical and functional), to focus in great detail on just the patella (this, not this).

The patella is a mysterious structure: a sesamoid bone like I’ve argued elephant predigits are, and probably the best known sesamoid, but still quite enigmatic– especially in non-humans and most particularly in non-mammals. Why did it evolve three different times, at least? What mechanical/developmental environment encourages it to form? Why don’t some species have them? Does the presence of a patella tell us anything about posture, gait, or anything else? Why did no giant dinosaurs evolve patellae?

Anyway, I now have a related PhD studentship that I need a great EU/UK-based student to apply for, and I’m casting a wide net. It’s a very, very freezer-based PhD: imagine cutting up the knees of the frozen zoo of critters that I’ve shown on this blog already, to your heart’s content! And studying fossils, and doing histology (cool imaging techniques with RVC faculty Michael Doube and Andy Pitsillides, along with bone uber-guru Alan Boyde), and conducting experiments with real animals, and computer modelling both experimental and fossil data… this PhD has it all.

Here are the details. If you know anyone in the EU/UK looking for a good PhD that seems to fit the bill very well, send them my way please!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled frozen organisms… and there is a fun post coming tomorrow!

The knee of an emu from my freezer, showing the many muscles and other tissues that connect to or surround the patella. It’s complicated, and that makes for fun science!

Then, also out in our cafe area you’ll find some nice smaller specimens in addition to our elephant. Such as:

A decent mount of a three-toed sloth is above; and below I’ll share several skulls including a second hippo (male? quite different morphology from the other one I showed):

And another charismatic megafauna, a ?black? rhinoceros (shown previously as a mounted skeleton in our old hall):

And a small gharial (Gavialis) skull:

Which can be nicely juxtaposed with a more robust Caiman (or our earlier Alligator):

And then a small wallaby:

Let’s go back inside. I have a few more friends for you to meet. Such as our chimp next to a Lucy skeleton (both casts), briefly glimpsed in my first post:

And a really, really gnarly-faced bulldog! Shudder.

During my brief perusal of the exhibits the other day, I realized I had never shared our nice knee joint dissection in my post on those specimens, nor had I included it in my knotations about knee joints. This is particularly egregious as I am now doing a year-long fellowship/sabbatical to study knee joints, in particular the patella (kneecap) of birds. Here, a dog, with helpful labels of the anatomy around the stifle:

And that’s all folks! I’m preparing a particularly wacky post for later, which will include lots of whimsical anatomy, so stay tuned and keep coooooooool!